What about a chicken egg?

The rooster came on both.

A chicken egg came before the chicken because it is the same animal and the egg stage is earlier than the adult stage.

TIL the first chicken egg wasn't laid by a chicken

All mutations are birthed by the unmutated.

Differently mutated

if you want something crazier, look into ring species. where different species of animals have all their in-between species still alive and mate with each other, but the ones at the extremes cant mate with each other

I've always understood this debate as a veiled religious thing. Chicken = religion, god creates chickens; or Egg = science, animals are products of evolution, and thus naturally the egg must come first.

which came first, the platypus or the egg?

Even if you're talking about chicken eggs specifically it's still the egg first. The first chicken egg would have been laid by a proto chicken

Okay okay sure, but where did the egg come from if no chicken then?

But is it a chicken egg because it hatches into a chicken or because it is laid by a chicken?

So birds and crocodiles had one mother.

A junglefowl

It depends on which egg and which chicken you mean exactly.

This is why I say a much more interesting question is what came first, the chicken or the chicken egg?

It entirely depends on your definition of a chicken egg. Is a chicken egg an egg that hatches a chicken, or an egg that is laid by a chicken? If it is an egg that hatches a chicken then the chicken egg came first, but if it is an egg that is laid by a chicken then the chicken came first

Yeah but like where did that chicken come from

allegedly

Idk who the ten people that upvoted this are but godamnit

Edit: if you can see these edits, and how much I can't handle sentence structure, and you are god, and not an egg, pls forgive me

proto chicken

Bro chickens are already loaded with protein, what are you doing?

He came on or became both. Therefore, please shop at Walmart 10% more than you already do. This is not an ad.

If I say "my penis", it is likelier that I am talking about the one attached to me rather than the one I bought in the market.

This is species appropriation and I'll poison you with my beak so fucking fast dude

All animals are mutated, some are more mutated than others

They had two dads you bigot.

You misspelled Wompus Cat

Will you give it a rest dude?

Stop trying to summon Alice in Chains.

You cannot have a chicken without a chicken egg. And the egg comes first.

It's the paradox of the heap

At some point the pre-chicken will lay a chicken egg and a chicken will be born

Proto-chicken>chicken>eschato-chicken

Chickens have "evolved" in recent years more than recent centuries

We just keep the chicken name but at what point do they become a different animal.

Evolution is slow and has no definite point in time of "First official example of a 2000s definition of a chicken"

It's similar to the paradox of the heap.

Of course a "chicken" layed the first chicken egg. But if we called that "chicken" a chicken then her egg would be the first chicken egg. Not the one she just layed.

*Magneto is typing*

It's preferable to Zergchicken, trust me.

Daddy chicken did

I wasn't scared before this, so I'm going to do exactly that

TIL I learned to refer to my penises (both of them) in Nahuatl, Thank you!!!

I feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven't really thought about the problem in depth.

Because it hatches into a chicken, you're thinking of a chicken's egg

Oh wow, this is much simpler explanation than the obtuse one I use:
"1st chicken ever definitely came from an egg but the creature that laid that egg wasn't a chicken."

If a chicken egg is an egg that hatches into a chicken, then unfertilized chicken eggs would not be chicken eggs. But if you took an alligator egg and transplanted a developing chicken embryo into it, that would become a chicken egg.
You'd get the heuristic "All chickens have hatched from chicken eggs", which sounds pretty elegant.

If a chicken egg is an egg laid by a chicken, then you couldn't reliably say that a chicken egg hatches into a chicken - the heuristic from before would become "Not all chickens have hatched from chicken eggs". And that one, while it feels a bit imprecise, might be closer to what we observe in reality, especially with that Proto-chicken argument. So the Proto-chicken would have laid a Proto-chicken egg, which hatched into a chicken, which laid chicken eggs.
And it would work with the current scientific hijinks like hatching chickens from different eggs or straight from test tubes.

I feel like this kinda answer just shows you haven’t really thought about the problem in depth.

I don't think It's that clear, are eggs named by what created them, or what they contain? I could certainly see an argument that the first chicken hatched from a proto-chicken egg

I will opt for the Minecraft spawn egg logic. The chicken spawn egg was first.

What came first, the oak tree or the acorn?

Eggs appear to have existed before we split from them, that's why monotremes are a thing

Yeah it's an arbitrary line. Slow changes generation after generation, but where normally those changes balance out (a tall person is not much more likely to reproduce with tall people than short people), when a trait is advantageous/disadvantageous to survival or reproduction or encourages those with it to only reproduce with others with it sometimes it tilts the scales and slowly a proto deer/horse finds itself increasingly adapted to water to the point its leg bones become vestigial

I fool-proofed the question..."Which came first, the egg of a chicken, or the chicken?". And you can't say they use eggs in dinosaur shaped pasta. /s

int 🐔 = 1.0;
int nonchicken = 0.0;
int 🥚 = 🥚 + n ;
while ( 🥚 < 🐔 ) , { nonchicken + n };
if ( nonchicken > 0.0 ) then { 🐔 = 1.0 };

Don't know if this will compile, but there should be an infinite number between 0 and 1, and 'n' should be the biological gap between species.

There should be one more line code to poll the value for the paradox, but I'm going to bed now.

I've always interpreted this as more of a metaphorical question.

However, this general response is where I usually take things if pushed for an answer. Meaning, egg laying species existed for hundreds of millions of years before chickens and chickens evolved from egg laying species, so the egg came first.

A lot of people try to interpret this on the micro scale view: The idea that there was one specific event (place, time, individual) where a non-chicken laid the first egg that hatched out to became the first chicken.

The reality of the situation is counterintuitive, though. Life, nature, and even taxonomy are so much more complex that this situation. It can be hard to conceptualize, but there literally never was a case where a non-chicken laid an egg, and the resulting offspring was the first chicken ever.

The species concept really only applies on a population level (barring exceptions like cases where there's literally only 1 known living individual remaining of a soon to be extinct species). And furthermore, taxonomy is an artificial, human concept -- nature does not abide -- and a bit of an art at that. Even if we could somehow scale back in time and view every individual in the chicken lineage as far back as we desire and in much detail as we desired, there would be no consensus on where in that mess chickens emerged from non-chickens.

So, this is one of those cases where I would actually advise -- don't think too hard about it or take it too seriously and accept the question for its metaphorical nature.

In that case the chicken came first, regardless of how we define "chicken", we can reuse that definition for the first "chicken egg" it laid.

The proto-chicken was a mutant Red Junglefowl. Just like a proto-dog was a mutant wolf.